Interim report and risk assessment
Literature review
Overweight and obesity forms a basis of numerous health concerns arising from them. It is therefore hard to apply preventive measures and maintain the measures over a long period of time. World health organization estimates the number of teens and adolescents suffering from obesity to be around 41 million globally (World Health Organization, 2018 Pg. 6). Fortunately a majority of teens, 95%, now report they own a smartphone or can gain access to one (“Teens, Social Media & Technology 2018”, 2018 Pg. 5). This presents a huge potential for the innovation of digitized programs used to cut down weight delivered through phone apps. This proposed project aims at analyzing the effectiveness of a gamification-based mobile phone application used to fight obesity in obese teens. This would take into consideration their perceptions and enjoyment of the app (“Teens, Social Media & Technology 2018”, 2018 Pg. 5).
Current progress
A trial was carried out in a primary health care clinic of an academic center. It was conducted on adolescents who met the following criteria.
- 15–19 years of age
- Fluent in English
- Overweight ‘according to the World Health Organization definition(World Health Organization, 2018 Pg. 5)
- Daily access to a smartphone.
Don't use plagiarised sources.Get your custom essay just from $11/page
The participants are then to be assessed for 6 months over which changes in blood pressure, body composition, waist circumference, and health-related quality was evaluated. This is because a 6-month check-up protocol provides enough period to notice conclusive changes in a person’s body mass index (Lubans et al., 2018 Pg. 56)
Obstacles to progress
A risk assessment was carried out and it showed that the project may face the following obstacles in its implementation.
- Non-availability of hardware components or computer resources which can be used to improve on the application.
- Human participants not being found.
- Failures to correctly assemble the soft-wares and checking for errors (debugging).
Due to the nature of the project, a qualitative risk assessment was employed so as to properly analyze the risk and likelihood and the resulting consequences (Lubans et al., 2018 Pg. 67).Through this method, it was easier to identify the weak spots in the project and thus come up with preventive actions so as to reduce the effect that these risks will have on the project.
The next process would be to come up with a risk management strategy. This would be carried out as follows;
| Description of risk | Description of impact | Probability rating | Impact rating | Preventive actions |
| Non-availability of hardware components | Possible failure in coming up with the software | medium | high | Use of quality appropriate hardware |
| Lack of human participants and volunteers | Lack of proper testing | Medium | high | Use of incentives so as to encourage people to take part in the test |
| Failure to debug the software | Failure of the app to work | low | high | Constant debugging and reviews from the users |
According to Lubans et al. (2018, Pg. 56), in the event of something accidentally occurring, say, the software crashes, it should be analyzed using an event tree analysis. When the occurrence of the event may lead to different consequences, it may be illustrated by consequence spectrum. Proper guidelines should be put in place and the advisable means to counteract the event occurring. It is also important to consider the likelihood of the smartphone application failing. This is done through a failure mode and effect analysis which addresses the following questions;
- What could cause failure of the app?
- What would be the effects of failure modes on the project?
- How serious would these failure modes be?
- How can failure mode be detected and corrected?
Future project timeline
| Order | Task | Expected duration of completion |
| 1 | Data collection | 6 months |
| 2 | Data analysis | 1 month |
| 3 | Report writing | 2 weeks |
References
Lubans, D., Smith, J., Plotnikoff, R., Dally, K., Okely, A., Salmon, J. and Morgan, P. (2018). Assessing the sustained impact of a school-based obesity prevention program for adolescent boys: the ATLAS cluster randomized controlled trial.
Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech. (2018). Teens, Social Media & Technology 2018. [online] Available at: http://www.pewinternet.org/2018/05/31/teens-social-media-technology- 2018/ [Accessed 16 Nov. 2018]
World Health Organization. (2018). Global Health Observatory (GHO) data. [online] Available at: http://www.who.int/gho/en/ [Accessed 12 Nov. 2018].